John 20:27-29
Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
I wonder how Thomas felt in that moment. Jesus mysteriously appears in the midst of the room and after offering a gentle greeting he locks eyes with Thomas and repeats to him his words of doubt and unbelief from a week prior…when Jesus was not in the room at the time. Perhaps Thomas assumed that one of his friends had told Jesus, but more likely, when faced with the resurrected Jesus he just accepted that Jesus knew of his doubts. Spurgeon noted that, “The whole conversation was indeed a rebuke, but so veiled with love that Thomas could scarcely think it so.” It must have been wonderful to be fully known yet fully loved.
“Put your finger here, and see my hands…”
Jesus chose to indulge Thomas’ demands. He certainly was not obligated to do so, but out of love and mercy he gave him what he asked for. That is not always the case, of course, but sometimes Jesus allows us to “get what we ask for” in order to teach us a lesson, or simply to rebuke us. On the other hand, as James reminds us, “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions” (Jas 4:3). I think Thomas wanted to believe, but perhaps out of fear of disappointment, he lowered his expectations…and instead of exercising his faith, he exercised his flesh.
“My Lord and my God!”
The passage does not record that Thomas actually took Jesus up on his offer to touch his wounds, but rather, simply exclaimed his belief. Seeing Jesus’ wounds was proof enough to know that he been resurrected from the grave. It wasn’t a vision or some mass delusion…it was true. The Apostle Paul would later write that if Jesus had not actually been resurrected from the grave, that all of their ministry efforts had been in vain, along with their faith (1 Cor 15:14). The same is true today. A non-resurrected Christ is no Christ at all.
“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
There is a special blessing for those who believe by faith, rather than by demanding a sign or a vision or some supernatural experience. The British theologian Adam Clarke observed, “From this we learn that to believe in Jesus, on the testimony of his apostles, will put a man into the possession of the very same blessedness which they themselves enjoyed. And so has God constituted the whole economy of grace that a believer, at eighteen hundred years’ distance from the time of the resurrection, suffers no loss because he has not seen Christ in the flesh.” Are you in possession of that blessing? I certainly hope so.
